Portrait of a Genius

JAMES BOSWELL: THE EARLIER YEARS (1740-1769) by Frederick A. Pottle. 606 pages. McGraw-Hill. $12.50.

Scotland's James Boswell (1740-95) has done most of his growing in the grave. Until he died, his Life of Samuel Johnson was more esteemed as a feat of stenography than as a work of literature. In the 19th century, the book was accurately revalued as the first great biography in English, but its author was dismissed by proper Victorians as a whoremongering buffoon. "Servile and impertinent," Lord Macaulay called him, "a bigot and a sot, a talebearer, a common butt in the taverns of London." But Boswell was to have the last word --in fact, several million of them.

In Ireland's Malahide Castle, at intervals between 1925 and 1941, Boswell's descendants discovered a vast mass of manuscript stacked in a hideous old ebony cabinet, in the moldy loft of a barn, in an ancient croquet box. It was the literary find of the century: thousands of Boswell's letters, notes for the Life and drafts of it in his own hand, above all the manuscript of his masterpiece--the voluminous journal he kept for 35 years. Published in seven installments between 1950 and 1963, the Journal (which sold 2,500,000 copies) dramatically transformed the lusty laird of Auchinleck from a minor to a major figure in 18th century letters and at the same time multiplied a thousandfold the known facts of his life.

A new biography was obviously in order, and the first half of one has now been supplied by the man best qualified to write it: Yale's Frederick A. Pottle, 68, who for 37 years has served as custodian and editor of the Boswell papers. With phrases and perceptions long seasoned in sensibility, he builds a warm, complex and radically altered portrait of his subject. The face shows the same old clutter of confusions: arrogance, snobbery, priggery, pushiness, stinginess, grossness, rampant infantilism. But behind the confusions, Pottle perceives the fundamental fear and hunger in the man and, more acutely than any earlier biographer, discerns his peculiar powers: the geysering energy, the shimmering charm, the surging sympathy and undefended heart that left him open to a range of experience the greatest novelists alone outreach. Yet for all his genius, Boswell as Pottle sees him is common man in microcosm, an all-too-human being rattling, prattling, wriggling, giggling, creeping, weeping along through a procrastinated adolescence like a great big lovable ninny who believes that all the world is his playpen and all possible experience his pabulum.

Duty to Enjoy. He was born in Edinburgh, the first son of a stern Scots jurist and a mother who spoiled her little Jamie to make up for his father's puritanical severity. At 17, while studying in Edinburgh, he fell platonically in love with an older woman who was Catholic, and when his father precautiously transferred him to the University of Glasgow, Boswell ran off to London, intending to be converted and take holy orders. Before taking orders, he took a girl named Sally Forrester, whose charms persuaded him of his "duty to enjoy" a secular life. He enjoyed it so much that even a case of "that distemper with which Venus plagues her votaries"--the first of a dozen or more attacks of gonorrhea he suffered in his 20s--failed to revive his religious convictions. When a Scottish nobleman introduced him to the Duke of York, Boswell decided that London was the life for him.

Back in Edinburgh, having once more "catched a Tartar" in a "mansion of gross sensuality," he published a long theatrical review (signed "A Genius") and a volume of atrocious verse. At 22, though he had four liaisons running concurrently, not to mention the trulls he slept with in teams, he found time and energy to start his journal.

Every morning he wrote into it the orders of the day: where to go, whom to see, how to act, what to wear, eat, read, buy, say and even feel. "One should not have more corn growing than one can get in," he reminded himself. "I should live no more than I can record and leave nothing of myself hidden." A confessional impulse of such intensity was something new in English writing. "Boswell scanned the swarming variety in his own nature," says Pottle, "with the pleased detachment of a naturalist watching a sectioned anthill." But he also scanned life with a quick delighted eye. "I can tune myself so to the tone of any bearable man I am with," he wrote proudly, "that he is as much at freedom as with another self."

Enter Dr. Johnson. It is the talent of a great interviewer, but it functioned only feebly in Boswell's interviews with his father, who threatened continually to disinherit his feckless son. "Better to snuff out a candle," he snarled, "than leave it to stink in a socket." In London later that year, the talent was further tried by a man who hated Scots and sycophants and saw both in Boswell. "Mr. Johnson," Boswell gasped as he sat gaping at the Grand Cham of English letters, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." Fixing Boswell with the cold eye of a constable sizing up a fugitive from justice, Johnson applied the famous crusher: "That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help." But a few minutes later, Johnson was warming to his "other self," and at their third encounter he cried: "Give me your hand! I have taken a liking to you!"

A loving father had been found at last. Boswell fell at the great man's feet to confess what a bad boy he had been and to beseech counsel. Johnson gave it without stint, and when Boswell sailed for the continent a few weeks later he made a two-day journey to Harwich to put him on board and to comfort a frightened young man he had known little more than two months.

And Then Voltaire. In Switzerland, Boswell pulled off the first great coup of his tufthunting tour: an interview with Europe's second most famous author--Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "Go away!" moaned Rousseau, who had to go to the bathroom. "Not yet!" Boswell gritted. "I still have 25 minutes." Liking his nerve and his sincerity, Rousseau gave Boswell six interviews and sent him on his way with a sackful of quotes. Nine days later, Boswell was interviewing Europe's most famous author--Voltaire. In the course of a furious argument about God, Boswell pressed so hard that the wily Frenchman feigned a faint to gain a respite. But when Boswell left, they were friends and he was walking on air. "What variety my mind is capable of!" he wrote in his journal. "I have a noble soul."

In Italy, he expressed his nobility in "the noble passion of lust." He also had an audience with Pope Clement XIII ("He looked jolly landlord and smiled") and charmed Lord Mountstuart, the 20-year-old son of Lord Bute, the favorite of King George HI. It was Boswell's big chance for a career at court, and he muffed it. He took Mountstuart to a whorehouse, brought him home severely plagued by Venus, was dismissed in disgrace from milord's retinue.

A Happy Ending. Was Boswell downhearted? Not for long. After a thrilling visit to the chief of the Corsican rebels, he dashed off an eloquent Account of Corsica and found himself suddenly a bestselling author. Three years, four courtships and five mistresses later, Boswell was well established as an Edin burgh advocate, and at 29 married an impecunious cousin, Margaret Montgomerie. Father was furious, but Boswell insisted that he really loved the girl. And he really did. As the volume ends, the reader realizes that Boswell was less a fool than he liked to seem, though certainly more a fool than it is safe to be. Pottle leaves-him, as Wyndham Lewis put it, "teetering on the verge of sanity." And he leaves the reader fully prepared for the literary peaks and the emotional chasms that punctuate the landscape of Boswell's later life.

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